Mohammad Shafia is led into court in Kingston Ontario on Tuesday October 11, 2011.Lars Hagberg
If Canadian authorities had discovered that an Afghan-born immigrant now on trial for murder had concealed the fact that he had two wives, he and his large family would all have been deported, his trial heard Tuesday.
"They would have withdrawn residence for all the family," Montreal immigration lawyer Sabine Venturelli told the jury.
Ms. Venturelli had been acting for Rona Amir Mohammad, the first wife of entrepreneur Mohammad Shafia, and had been in the process of seeking permanent residency for her client when Ms. Mohammad and three of Mr. Shafia's teenaged daughters were found drowned in a waterway lock, just east of Kingston, in June, 2009.
Polygamy in Canada is illegal, and when Ms. Mohammad arrived in Quebec in November, 2007, several months after Mr. Shafia and the rest of his family, immigration officials were told she was his cousin – a fiction publically maintained until her death. And she was, indeed, akin to an aunt in her relationship with several of the seven children, none of whom were biologically hers, the trial has heard.
But legally she was the wife of Mr. Shafia, who arrived in Quebec under the province's investor immigrant program.
Ms. Venturelli, who was twice able to get Ms. Mohammad's visitor visa extended and had been hopeful her client would get to stay permanently on humanitarian grounds, told the Superior Court trial that she too had no idea Ms. Mohammad was part of a clandestine polygamous arrangement.
But for the jurors, the implications were twofold: The bid for permanent residency could have led to extremely awkward questions about the Shafia family's living arrangements; and even if the Shafias managed to stave off deportation, under Canadian law it would be the first wife, Ms. Mohammad, who would have had first claim to her husband's property and other assets.
Mr. Shafia, 58, his second wife, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, and their eldest son, Hamed, 20, have each pleaded not guilty to four counts of first-degree murder.
The charges were laid three weeks after the bodies of Zainab, Sahar and Geeti Shafia, aged 19, 17 and 13, respectively, were discovered in a car at the bottom of a waterway lock on the Rideau Canal, just east of Kingston. The cause of death was drowning, autopsies showed, but where and how they perished has not been established.
Also in the submerged Nissan Sentra was Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, who had married her husband more than 20 years earlier.
Travelling in two vehicles, the 10-member party had been returning to Montreal after a short vacation in Niagara Falls, and the three defendants told police a mysterious accident took place during an overnight stay at a Kingston motel, when Zainab and the other three victims took one of the cars for a joyride.
Police swiftly suspected foul play, however, and the prosecution thesis is that multiple so-called "honour killings" were committed, principally to restore the family's "reputation," supposedly stained by the rebellious conduct of the three Shafia sisters, in particular the interest the older two had in boys.
As for Ms. Mohammad, the jury has also heard that she was constantly mistreated by the three defendants after rejoining the family in the Montreal borough of St. Leonard: trapped in a home where she was treated like a servant; forbidden to go out at night; in constant fear of her husband and his second wife, Ms. Yahya; and without legal documents, which her husband had taken from her.
"She spoke of physical abuse by her husband many times and by his wife once," the seven-woman, five-man jury was told Tuesday by Fahima Vorgetts, who lives in Virginia and runs an organization called Women for Afghan Women.
Mr. Shafia would often pull his first wife's hair, kick her and humiliate her, Ms. Vorgetts told the trial, recounting a series of telephone conversations she had with Rona Amir Mohammad.
Many times she advised her to get out of the dysfunctional house and go to the police and perhaps a women's shelter, Ms. Vorgetts testified. But Ms. Mohammad was too afraid to do that.
"She said that if she went to the police, her husband would kill her," Ms. Vorgetts testified.
The jury also heard from Ms. Mohammad's younger sister, Diba Abdali Masoomi, who lives in France and has given lengthy testimony about her sister's travails. Ms. Masoomi ended her loquacious evidence with an emotional plea.
"I respect you and I thank you all," she said, speaking in her native Dari, which is similar to Farsi, translated and piped through the headphones that almost everyone in the courtroom wears. "I just want justice from the government of Canada."